S-01
Internal Business Applications
One system of record for the work your team does every day. Scheduling, inventory, job tracking, approvals. Built around how you operate, not how a template thinks you should.
Custom software for businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets.
I design and build the websites, internal systems, portals and integrations that keep a business running. Over twenty years of production engineering, written to be maintained long after launch. You talk to the person writing the code.
Discovery → Architect → Build Out → Deploy → Support · One engineer, start to finish
01 / What I build
Software shaped around the way you work.
Eight kinds of work, one engineer. Most projects start as one of these and end up touching two or three.
S-02
Customer Portals
Give customers a place to check status, upload documents, pay invoices and stop emailing your staff for answers the system already has.
S-03
Workflow Automation
The copy-paste between systems, the Friday report someone builds by hand, the reminder nobody sends. Turned into jobs that run on schedule and log what they did.
S-04
SaaS Product Development
Multi-tenant platforms with billing, roles and tenant isolation designed in from day one, so customer number 200 doesn't require a rewrite.
S-05
CRM & ERP Systems
When off-the-shelf costs more to bend than to replace. Custom pipelines, quoting, purchasing and reporting that match your actual process.
S-06
API Integrations
Connect accounting, payments, shipping, OEM feeds and the rest of your stack. With retries, monitoring and alerts for when a vendor's API has a bad day.
S-07
Legacy System Modernization
Rewrite the old app in place, module by module, while the business keeps using it. No big-bang cutover weekend.
S-08
Business Websites
Fast sites on a CMS your staff can update without calling anyone. Built by an engineer, so they hook into your systems and survive the next plugin update.
02 / Process
A process with drawings before it has code.
Five phases, the same engineer in every one. You see the plan before you pay for the build, and working software every week after that.
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Phase 01
Discover
Sit with the people who do the work. Map where data lives and where it breaks.
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Phase 02
Architect
Data model, system boundaries and integration points, on paper, before a line is written.
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Phase 03
Build
Short cycles, working software on a staging server you can click through every week.
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Phase 04
Deploy
Data migrated, staff trained, rollback plan written. Launch is a non-event.
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Phase 05
Support
Monitoring, updates and new features from the same engineer who built it.
↺ Support feeds the next round of discovery
You receive
- 01 Discover
- Written findings and a scoped proposal
- 02 Architect
- Architecture document and fixed milestones
- 03 Build
- Weekly demos and a tested codebase
- 04 Deploy
- Production launch and a runbook
- 05 Support
- A support plan with a named engineer
03 / Case studies
Case studies, written like engineering reports.
What was broken, what couldn't change, what got built, and what it was worth.
Automotive
Multi-tenant platform for an OEM dealer network
- Type
- Legacy modernization, SaaS
- Stack
- Laravel, Livewire, microservices
- Duration
- ~18 months
A. Problem
A Symfony monolith serving hundreds of dealerships had become slow to change. Every feature risked breaking another tenant.
B. Constraints
Live system, no downtime window. Dealer data isolated per tenant. Front end mid-migration from React to Vue.
C. Solution
Incremental Laravel rewrite behind the existing routes, module by module. High-load features split into separate services.
D. Outcome
~40%
Drop in response times after the rewrite.
Legal
Practice management platform for law firms
- Type
- SaaS product, built from zero
- Stack
- Laravel, Filament, Pest
- Duration
- ~14 months
A. Problem
Small firms tracked matters, deadlines and billable time across spreadsheets, email threads and a calendar. Things got missed.
B. Constraints
Client confidentiality, strict separation between firms, and an audit trail on every record a court might ask about.
C. Solution
Multi-tenant platform with role-based access, matter timelines, document handling and time entry in one place. Tested end to end.
D. Outcome
~16 hrs
Saved a week, as reported by firms using it.
Healthcare
Web infrastructure for a national care provider
- Type
- Platform consolidation
- Stack
- WordPress Multisite, PHP
- Duration
- ~8 months
A. Problem
Every facility had its own website, its own plugins and its own security holes. Updating them meant logging into each one.
B. Constraints
Non-technical editors at each location. Corporate brand rules. Sites that had to stay up through the migration.
C. Solution
A single Multisite network on a shared theme, with locked-down templates editors can't break and one place to patch.
D. Outcome
230+ sites
Running on one codebase, updated once.
04 / About
Work directly with the developer building your system.
I'm Christopher McGrath. I've spent over twenty years building and running production software: enterprise SaaS for automotive dealer networks, web infrastructure for a national healthcare provider, custom e-commerce, and legal practice management.
Load Bearing Code is how I work with businesses directly. The person on your discovery call designs the architecture, writes the code, ships it, and answers the phone when something needs to change.
No project managers.
You talk to the person writing the code, not someone relaying messages to them.
No outsourcing.
Every line is written here, by me. Nothing gets handed to a team you've never met.
05 / Credentials
Credentials
Experience
20+
Years building and running production software.
Systems built
- Multi-tenant SaaS platforms
- CRMs and internal operations tools
- Business websites and custom e-commerce
- Large-scale CMS networks
- Service-based architectures
Technologies
- Laravel
- PHP
- Livewire
- Filament
- Symfony
- Node.js
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Vue
- React
- Alpine.js
- HTML & CSS
- Tailwind CSS
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- MSSQL
- Redis
- REST APIs
- Stripe
- WordPress
- Linux
- Nginx
- Docker
- AWS
- Git
- GitHub Actions
- Pest
- ASP.net
- C#
Domains served
- Automotive dealerships
- Legal practices
- Healthcare
- Retail and e-commerce
- Freelancers and agencies
06 / Contact
Tell me what's holding the business back.
Start with a 30-minute call. No charge and no pitch. You explain what's slowing things down, and I'll tell you honestly whether custom software is the fix, roughly what it would take, and what I'd do first.